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OK, so it is said that history
is written by the victors, but in the
era of information, we just have to dig
out the truth and expose the lies.
The student archive is a group of
volunteers dedicated to documenting
human rights violations committed by all
sides during the Syrian conflict,
with over 2000 incidents preserved
in more hours of online footage than
there have been hours of conflict.
The Syrian archive is the only tool
to gather and verify all this data.
Without further ado, I present to you
this year Nakib team.
Hello, everyone, my name is Kathy,
and I'm Jeff Sorich.
First of all, I would like to thank you
for being here and thank you for inviting
us. It's really, uh, we appreciate
being able to present here, uh,
what will be going through in the next
30 minutes, uh, is an overview
of the project, their backgrounds,
uh, specific problems that we have
identified by working on user generated
content, uh, our methodology
and, uh, three case studies as
well as our plans for 2017.
So we have started this work, uh, in
Turkey in 2014, working with journalists,
uh, lawyers and human rights activists.
Uh, and the project is about
a platform that collects, verifies,
uh, preserve and analyze
visual documentation of human rights
violations.
And the goal is to create an evidence
based tool that can be used for reporting
advocacy, accountability by
journalists, human rights defenders and
lawyers.
Since then, we have been collaborating
with a number of groups, uh,
the United Nations or Shihad, which is
the investigation team based in Geneva,
doing investigations on Syria.
Since 2012, we've been working
with them on investigations related to
Aleppo since they got the mandate to do
this from the Security Council a few
weeks ago.
And we've been also working with Human
Rights Watch later to cluster munitions
research in Syria, Amnesty International
as well with the
digital verification team, which is a
group of young professionals from
Berkeley University and Essex University
who are helping us doing in-depth
verification.
We've been also collaborating with
Billancourt, which is a collective
of investigators specializing in the use
of open source investigations.
Uh, we're also working
with the Meedan, uh, integrating
their platform, which is a collaborative
verification platform, uh,
also with the witness in terms of
improving our methodology and workflow
with technical technology collective
that are supporting us in the development
of the collecting infrastructure, as well
as, of course, citizen journalists,
lawyers and human rights defenders as
they are our main source of information,
such such as the Institute for
Justice.
So since the Tunisian revolution, we have
seen a big shift in how conflict
has been being reported.
Uh, so from, uh, being
reported by journalists, NGOs who had
access to the country into
depending on user generated content,
especially in areas where you can't
actually access the country.
Uh, journalists and NGOs are banned
from reporting. And in the case of Syria,
there are more hours of online footage
than they are actually ours in the
conflict itself.
And hidden in that footage, there's
hundreds of untold stories of human
rights violations and possibly
war crime evidence.
But with this user generated content that
we have been working with, we identified
three kind of problems.
One of it is the content is being erased
and can be found.
Content is not verified.
The content is unsearchable.
So working with lawyers and human rights
activists, they are
doing this work in a hostile environment.
There have been attacks and targeted by
many groups for doing their work.
There have been attacks by all kinds of
weapons. Basically,
their devices get damaged, their data
gets lost, the evidence gets lost.
Of course, when they are moving through
checkpoints where they are moving through
borders, also, their devices are seized,
damaged, and of course, information
is being lost. If they are publishing
what they have on social media platform,
it's being deleted, is being removed
because it violates the privacy policy
of those commercial social media services
and also because their accounts
get hacked because of what they are
publishing.
In this case, Physicians for Human Rights
has worked on
an investigation and documentation
related to attacks against hospitals in
Syria.
They refer to visual evidence that was
published on YouTube.
It's not there anymore.
We lost the evidence that actually refers
to this type of attack and I don't know
if we can get it again.
Uh, it's not just us that are
having this problem, but also other
investigators, such as
Blanchot Elliot from Billycart,
who is the director, has been doing a lot
of work on chemical attacks that happened
in August 2013.
And basically most of the evidence
that he has been looking for
and analyzing has been also
gun.
The other problem related to this is that
content is basically scattered
everywhere.
It's on different social media platforms,
different websites.
It's really hard to understand what
happened in a specific incident because
it's really hard to understand the full
image.
It's also, of course, scattered offline
when there's no Internet connectivity
and external hard drives or computers.
When it's published online, it's not
verified. There are hundreds and hundreds
of videos. We are not talking about one
or two that are coming every day.
With this comes a lot of fake information
as well, which makes it really hard for a
journalist and human rights organization
to actually respond to this huge amount
of data related to violations.
It is so difficult for
it to be searchable because it doesn't
have any kind of metadata when it's
published.
Also, metadata is being stripped from
social media platform when visual
evidence is published there.
Most reports that are published by human
rights organizations
or articles by journalists in different
formats, formats.
So it's really inaccessible.
So we worked
to address these three problems
in a variety of ways.
So for the first problem, the contents
being deleted or that it scattered
throughout the Internet, we worked
to develop an automated, secure content
backup tool.
So every day our content is being scraped
and backed up externally in servers
throughout the world.
Also, by making the platform,
the database online available online,
we've kind of centralized the data that's
being scattered throughout the Internet
and put it in one place
dealing with the fact that the content is
not verified. We've worked to develop a
very detailed methodology.
It's an open source methodology
that we're going to go into in a little
bit and also an
infrastructure so that we can
highlight how the verification is
actually working
and then relating to the fact that the
country's unsearchable.
We recognize the fact that
we needed to have a very standardized
metadata scheme and filter
system so that you can search through all
the content that we have.
So for the methodology, we found three
components.
There's a collection, the archival
component.
There's the basic verification component
and more in-depth investigations.
So there's five steps that we've
identified for collection in our kivel,
the first step before we have any of the
content is to first make a list
of all of our sources for
that content.
So we have identified 200 credible
sources made up of a variety of
individuals or organizations,
you know, local field clinics, individual
citizens and larger NGOs.
A lot of the sources that we're working
with have been reporting
on the conflict since 2011 or 2012,
although some are more recent.
So after we have a list of the sources
for the content, we need to develop a
list of sources for the verification,
you can't verify the content with the
same sources who are providing the
content.
So we need to develop the separate list.
And this is mostly made up of a team of
citizen journalists and journalists
and human rights defenders who are
located in Syria.
When we need additional information
regarding verification of any of the
videos, we get in touch with them and
they can also help us
identify a specific place
or item
in the videos.
And the third step that we have for the
collection archival is to
establish this metadata scheme
and we for our database
decide to use the metadata
scheme developed by the U.N.
Office for High Commissioner for Human
Rights.
And we did this because they are
in a unique position
to investigate and also to prosecute.
So we felt that if we
categorize our data by their standards,
then it could be useful for future
investigations.
These are some of the categories that
they have in their metadata scheme,
and I'm not going to go over all of them
now, but you can just see them.
We can come back to them later.
The first step of the collection of
archival is to record as much
of the metadata that we can.
So we want to contextualize the material
that we do have to identify the location,
the data that it was recorded and
uploaded. I can talk about that in a bit
and also the origin of the video, which
is a bit harder to identify.
As I mentioned, a lot of the metadata is
stripped when it's uploaded into social
media platforms.
So sometimes there's very little
additional information and sometimes it's
more.
And then step five, once we have
identified all of the metadata and an
incident, we work to collect
store hash and timestamp all
of the videos that we have
so that we can preserve the integrity of
the videos and make sure that
they're not modified after we have
downloaded them and stored in securely.
So for the verification, we also have
five steps, the first step, once
we have the video downloaded and stored
in our servers, is the person
to aggregate all the metadata that we
have using, as
I mentioned, the metadata scheme from
UNCHR, but also
additional metadata fields like
type of munitions used, if that's
able to be determined or
the weather unique landmarks
that are in individual videos.
Once we have all of that, we can start
the verification process
for the second step is to verify
the source of the video.
A lot of the videos that we're getting
are sent directly by sources
on the ground.
So in that case, we we know we know who
this is.
But when something is uploaded online, we
can determine the source by the user
accounts, whether it's a media house
or whether it's an individual journalist.
We we we we we determine
whether they're credible or not based on
their history of uploading and whether or
not they're known to us or not.
If they're not
within our database of credible sources,
we have a procedure for verifying them,
for vetting them. And I can go into that
in a bit.
The third step for verification
is to verify the location.
So this is the whole geolocation
component.
So there's basically geolocation that we
can determine by reading the
descriptions of the videos that we've
uploaded and also communicating with the
people who have uploaded them
in some cases.
We also do more in-depth geolocation
as that is going to go over in some of
the key studies.
And then a fourth step is verifying the
filming and the upload date, so
upload dates are able to be
determined by the date that it has been
uploaded to YouTube.
But there's tools developed by groups
like Witness and others that help with
this process.
Sometimes it may be difficult to
verify the date that it was actually
filmed. People can film,
they can upload it at the same day or
sometimes many months later.
So we have to cross-reference this with
a lot of news accounts, reports by NGOs
or international
human rights organizations.
And then the last step is to publish this
into our database, so
we make our database publicly available
and open in an open source format, and
this is what the database looks like.
So you can see on the left there's
an identifier, there's description, the
date that it was recorded, where it was
and a type of violation according to
the UNCHR standards.
So in the red box, you can see the type
of violation and this is using that
metadata scheme underneath
that, you can see the types of
weapons identified.
And then location.
And when you click on an individual
incident, you can see on the left hand
side, this is where the video is, they
don't auto play because we don't want to
expose people to content
that they might find disturbing.
And if we found that a video
has is particularly graphic, we always
include a warning and a red banner at
this one doesn't have it.
On the right hand side, you can see the
initial metadata at,
then blow it. We've geo located so you
can see where each video was actually
filmed. On the right hand side, you can
see more additional metadata like the
weather or weapons used.
So when we look at the videos altogether,
we've developed a map where you can
it's interactive. This is just a
screenshot, but you can zoom in or out
and you can find particular areas
where particular incidents were filmed.
This is all able to be filtered by the
type of munition used or the type of
investigation that we're doing, for
instance, on cluster bombs or chemical
weapons.
And with that, we've done a number of
investigations.
So we do this for a couple of reasons.
One, we wanted the archive to be used
as an advocacy tool for
people right now.
We wanted to keep people updated in terms
of what's the current situation.
We also want to speak directly
to policymakers, people like
the ICC, people like
the UNCHR and
others.
But also we recognize that there's a
strong amount of trust that's
needed between us and the people who are
uploading the videos
the way we need to trust them in order
to know that the content that they're
providing us with is legitimate or
if they're vouching for it,
that that they're making the correct
claims. But they also need to trust us
that we're using the data
for the intended purposes.
And this is particularly true when
they're sending us information directly.
So we have an investigation as
part of the website, as you can see here,
and the first one on chemical weapons is
a case study that is going to talk about
now.
So the first case study is related to
the use of chemical weapons in Syria
since 2011, until until now,
we have located and verified,
collected hundreds of visual evidence
related to this.
What we can quickly see from this is,
first, chemical weapons has been,
uh, a tool from the beginning of the
conflict since 2012.
Uh, most of the organizations maybe
or, uh, human rights community
think that it started in 2013 because
there is a very big incident there.
But it actually started before.
We could also see that it's still
continuing 2015 and 2016,
even after the OPCW, the Organization
of Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have
announced that they destroyed chemical
weapons in Syria in 2015.
Another graph that shows the peak,
uh, in 2013.
And most of the video has been published,
uh, there because there was a big
incident in the countryside of Damascus
of the use of sarin gas against
civilians.
Uh, we can see that it's still
continuing, not even November, but also
until a few days ago.
This is one of the recent incidents that
happened in eastern Aleppo, which was
the use of chlorine cylinders
against, uh, civilian and
also civilian areas.
Uh, this is the, uh, the
video that has been, uh,
published by the Syrian Institute
for Justice, which are lawyers that are
based in Aleppo.
And we can see that they are taking
footage of their impact sites after
the gas cylinder has been dropped
from this type of images.
We try to identify structure of the
buildings to be able to understand where
this actually happens.
Uh, this is the gas cylinder that was
used. We they sent us, uh,
a very close image to it.
If we go even closer, we
can see that there is the
sticker from A, B, B,
C, which is A, B, C, C, which is a
Jordanian company that produces, uh,
chemicals.
And, uh,
we also were able to
identify the structure of the buildings,
uh, as you can see, also the
impact site, as has been seen in the
videos, the tree
that has been seen also in the video.
And through that, we go to Google Earth
to be able to understand where
this actually happened.
And the title there is a description of
what happened and we looked around that
area. This is exactly where the cameraman
is standing.
And then by getting a
better satellite imagery, we can see
the same buildings on the right, the
impact site. And that she so we know
exactly that. This is the location
in eastern Aleppo that has been attacked.
This is not the only attack that's
used this kind of gas cylinder.
Uh, but also there have been, uh,
earlier ones from Zeta in October
2016.
Uh, there has been a recent one a few
weeks ago in Elfreda's district near
Aleppo, December 8th, 2016.
There has been another one a few days ago
that happened in the second Hanano in
Aleppo, December 18th, 2016,
which also shows a pattern
of the use of gas cylinder against
civilians. And we can identify
that this is one of the tactics that has
been used by the Syrian government to
take control of, uh, of Aleppo.
All these claimed reports
we can match with the
OPCW also report
that has been published in 2015 proving
that the Syrian government was
responsible for the use of chemicals
against civilians.
So the second, uh, case study is
related to, uh, cluster munitions used
in Syria.
Uh, it has been used by
the Syrian government and also by the
Russian government starting in their
operation, uh, September 2015.
They deny that they have any kind of,
uh, weapons like this in
Syria.
But there was a report
that has been published by Russia today.
So a video and this video,
uh, has been published from
an airbase, which is the main airbase
of the Russia aircraft.
And we can identify two types
of, uh, cluster munitions.
One is incendiary RPK and it's a
2.5, and the other one is
more as a cluster, uh, identified
cluster munitions, I believe, a hundred
eighty two point five RTM.
Uh, we there were also other,
uh, footage from an air base that we
are talking by journalists, uh, that
were there visiting, uh, and by
accident. They also, uh, photo
to this, uh, cluster munitions.
That is their.
So since then, we started to
collect and verify the
visual evidence from media activists that
there have been claims that there was a
cluster munitions has been used.
And with Human Rights Watch in
July 2016, we were
able to collaborate on a report about
cluster munitions used in Syria.
And through the database, they
have identified specific
types of cluster munitions, as we can see
in this light and also
on the.
So the third case study is related
to Israeli airstrikes.
Russian airstrikes, coalition airstrikes,
we started with the Russian airstrikes
since the beginning of the operation in
September 2015.
We have been collecting hundreds and
hundreds of also visual evidence related
to that.
We try to locate as much as possible
to understand what happened
and where where was the most attacks
happened and in which areas.
And we did some in-depth also
investigations of specific videos.
Uh, this is one of them.
It's it was published by the Just Short
Media Center, which is a group that is
based in Idlib.
And they were claiming that there was
a mosque being bombed.
It's called Hattab, and they were also
claiming that it was bombed by
Russian aircraft.
So after that, uh, the Russian Ministry
of Defense has
announced that they are not
responsible for this type of attack
and this is all fake
and they have published satellite imagery
of the actual mosque saying
that this is the actual mosque that
was reported.
And it's still intact.
And this is a recent satellite imagery.
So what we did is we asked one of the
journalists, our sources that we work
with from Idlib to take a photo
of this, uh, mosque
that has been showing on the satellite
image. And he did.
And it actually was still intact.
But the name was Al Faruk, not Farouk
not.
So we located this one
through Google Earth just to understand
where it is exactly.
And then what we try to do is we try to
do to look for other mosques
from close to this area.
And we have found this satellite imagery
that was posted on Facebook page
of the just distributed media center of
a mosque that is close to that
mosque. But it's still intact
because it was months before the attack.
But through the satellite imagery, we
were able to locate
the drone image with the
videos that has been published about the
attack. This is one of the videos from
one of the sources, Asherman Abdullah,
that we work with him in Idlib.
This is another one from other sources,
the just one media center.
And from there, we were able to use
Google Earth again to
locate, uh, the actual
mosque that was attacked.
And then we saw
that the distance is about one kilometer
between the claimed mosque that was
attacked and the
actual mosque. And we can see this
clearer and this footage
from Google Earth right now.
So it's about one kilometer away.
And we got
a clear satellite imagery where
after the attack, where we can see that
the mosque was was also attacked.
We have also noticed that the logo
of the satellite imagery published
by the Russian minister of defense is
covering the actual mosque that was
attacked.
And we don't know if it happened by
accident or if it's on purpose,
but we know that there was a fake
information or wrong information
that was published by the Ministry of
Defense.
So those are a couple of projects that
we're working on in 2016, but
for 2017, we have a bunch of plans.
One, we want to add a lot of new
sources of the base that we're
that we're using.
So these are both platform based.
Right now, we're using mostly videos from
YouTube.
But you also want to incorporate Twitter
and telegram into into our database
and also from organizations and
individuals like the Violations
Documentation Center, who's doing a lot
of really amazing work.
But we don't have their information in
our system yet.
And also groups like the UN
and various various
organizations that are working on
human rights issues that are currently
publishing in PDF format.
Of course, we also want to be
incorporating offline data sources more
into the database that we're using.
We're looking forward to continuing the
open source investigations that we're
doing with Belenkaya and with Amnesty
International's Digital Verification
Corps.
And we're looking to develop a toolkit
for open source investigations,
open source here, meaning
information that's publicly available.
But the toolkit itself is also going to
be open source, as in it
will be on gett and available for
comments.
So if you have any feedback, please let
us know.
And then lastly, we're looking to develop
a platform for collaborative verification
of large data sets.
So right now there isn't one.
There's projects like check
from meeting that are working on
verification and individual videos,
which is super, super helpful, but for
large data set that doesn't currently
exist.
So thanks so much for all your time.
If you have questions, I know we still
have a couple of minutes left.
Otherwise, we're available afterwards.
And if you have any interest in helping
or supporting us, you can check us out
here at our website.
We're on Twitter and you can email us.
That's EPDP King.
Thanks so much.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
We have a few minutes for questions, so
please microphone one.
So I want to ask, how could
you verify the number of casualty
casualties for every crime
and whether if your archive
include crimes, less
major crimes and the chemical weapons
that you've been used since
2011?
Right. So
we didn't verify the number
of casualties as a result
of the chemical attacks.
There are other organizations who are
doing so, like the Violation
Documentation Center.
And what we are trying to do is to
incorporate what they have dataset
with the visual evidence so we can
understand exactly what happened.
OK. And whether your archives
include other crimes that are
started since 2011 or
whether it just includes
crimes since 2014.
Um, so
we have videos
about crimes from 2011
until now, we were not able
to process all this information because
we're talking about thousands
of footage, but their plan
is to go through it for next year.
Thank you.
Uh, next question.
Microphone number three, I
just wanted to say that you're doing a
great job. It's very important that
somebody does this and, you know, it's
please keep this up.
It's actually two questions.
First question is, do
you have a narrative which brings
the facts together?
In a way, I'm not talking about a factual
narrative, but what the different parties
involved in this war are saying and what
they're claiming about these events.
So we know what happened, but
what are they saying about it?
And you have that in the platform.
And the second question is, how can we
help? I mean, we have a lot of people
here in this room probably want to help.
So how can we do that?
Right.
So for the first question, we don't have
the narrative from all the groups
that are on the ground.
What we focus on is just contextualizing
the visual evidence and make sure that it
has more metadata so it's more
understandable and more has a
value to be used for advocacy purposes,
accountability purposes and so on.
In terms of the help, I mean, we are here
really to to reach out to the hackers
community to and to
everyone who is able to help technically
and then technically on this in terms of
research, building methodology,
technical infrastructure
and more.
Yeah, and just to add onto that, I mean,
a lot of the methods that we're using are
pretty they're not that difficult
in all of our methodologies as outlined
in every report that we're writing,
what we're going to be making, this tool
kit that's available and get.
So if you have any suggestions, like,
please help us there, give us
some comments, that would be really
helpful. There's also a huge backlog of
lots of videos. I mean, if you have time,
it would be great to help us with some of
those things.
Thank you. I think we have one more time
to squeeze in one more question, but
please be precise.
Maybe the I.R.S.
Channel.
Well, we have questions
from ask one question
is if your work is based on the
international human rights definition or
if there is a special human rights
definition made in Syria.
And I'm sorry, can you repeat the
question?
One one user wants to know if
your work is based on the international
human rights definition by the UN
or if your
work relies on a special human rights
definition defined in Syria.
So it's it's we're using
the UN categories, which
means we are working according
to the international humanitarian law,
basically.
So some of that is related to also
the Syrian court panel
and some of it is not there.
But the standard is UN
charter and international humanitarian
law.
And I'm afraid that's all the time we
have. Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you. Thank you.